Carl Malamud’s latest online “public works” project, public.resource.org, is reported to make available later this week all Supreme Court opinions dating back to the 1700s and all U.S. appeals courts decisions dating back to 1950. Some commentators speculate that Malamud’s efforts potentially represent a challenge to paid legal research services Thomson and LexisNexis. His northern California-based non-profit group last week took delivery of content from Fastcase, which agreed in November to sell the information with no strings attached. Malamud’s group has spent the past several days reformatting the data to post on the Web site.
“We’re about getting bulk data and making it available,” free of charge, to the public, Malamud told the Conneticut Law Tribune. “I want to see all federal case law downloadable in bulk.” He asserted that there are no restrictions on the use of the information after it’s downloaded and that it’s up to individuals to create Web sites that utilize the information.
Any initiative that “makes case law available for free in new and different ways is something all librarians are in favor of,” said Darcy Kirk, associate dean for library and technology and law professor at the University of Connecticut. Read Full Story.
Malamud also recently launched a “PACER recycling site,” where users, who have downloaded federal case information at 8 cents per page can upload them to the recycling site to be accessed later free of charge.